Standard – Raid 6 disks and daily offsite backup.

As part of the service we keep hot-standby equipment ready in the datacentre to be used in the event of a major failure of any server. This means that if, for example, your server were to suffer a major hardware failure we would be able to swap the disks into a spare chassis and have the server up an running again very rapidly and with minimal disruption.

In addition to that, all our servers are equipped with RAID 6 or higher, which means that in the event of a hard disk failure (the most common component to fail) your server will just keep running, and our technicians will replace the disk. Raid 6 handles 2 concurrent disk failures, so it’s robust.

Backup: data is encrypted daily and backed up off site. So if the primary data centre was to be destroyed, we could rebuild your servers in a new data centre.

Extreme event protection – redundant server, redundant data centre

Our warm spare service adds a redundant server, in a secondary data centre. In the event of failure, we switch DNS to point to the redundant server, users logins will work as normal.

Here’s some scenarios with both options:

Standard 

Scenario

Impact on server

Any data loss?

Up to 2 drives fail

no impact, reboot scheduled with you

no

Core component failure

< 2 hours downtime

no

Data centre destroyed (whilst almost unheard off, data centres have been known to be temporarily knocked out by fire/earthquake. Unusual in Reading, where we host)

2-3 days downtime whilst new server built

Will lose anything uploaded since last daily backup – so worst case up to 24 hours worth of uploads.

Extreme event protection

Scenario

Impact on service

Any data loss? 

Up to 2 drives fail

no impact, reboot scheduled with you

no

Core component failure

< 2 hour downtime

no

Data centre destroyed (whilst almost unheard off, data centres have been known to be temporarily knocked out by fire/earthquake. Unusual in Reading, where we host)

< 4 hours downtime

Anything since last sync, worst case up to 1 hour of data.